David Grimm's entertaining The Miracle at Naples, which the Huntington is premiering in a lively production by artistic director Peter DuBois at the Calderwood Pavilion (through May 9), is a commedia dell'arte–inspired sex farce about traveling players — form equals content — who land in Naples in the autumn of 1580 at the time of the annual miracle of San Gennaro. Social activity stops dead until the saint's blood liquefies in the local church named for him. The lives of the small, rag-taggle band of actors and the locals they encounter — a motherless young woman named Flaminia (Christina Pumariega) and her duenna, Francescina (Alma Cuervo) — also come to a standstill while the characters strive to disentangle themselves from a mire of erotic confusions. Francescina renews her acquaintance with the troupe's leader, Don Bertolino (Dick Latessa), while her charge cavorts with his nephew Tristano (Pedro Pascal) and Tristano's pal Matteo (Gregory Wooddell). But then Flaminia falls for the leading man, Giancarlo (Alfredo Narciso), who has been toying with Don Bertolino's daughter La Piccola (Lucy DeVito).

In truth, commedia, the Italian improvisational comedy most familiar to contemporary audiences through the characters in Molière's plays, is a more prescribed form than Grimm's modern-day variant, as we see when the players perform their piece in the second act. (This overstated interlude is deadly; it stops the play in its tracks for a quarter of an hour.) Grimm, like Molière, uses ideas from commedia as a jumping-off point for his own themes, which have a distinctly 21st-century bent. The duenna counsels Flaminia that she can satisfy her sexual appetite while officially retaining her virtue by allowing a suitor to sodomize her. When she gives rein to her lust with the two randy young actors, though, Giancarlo is outraged; it doesn't occur to him to apply the same sexual standard to his own conduct with La Piccola. Meanwhile, Matteo and Tristano, under the influence of a bogus love potion that really just makes them drunk, wind up in bed and discover they're in love, but in the light of day Tristano's social consciousness and Catholic shame oblige him to deny it.

Projecting modern-day concerns onto a comedy with a period setting is tricky, but when it works it can be ticklish and satisfying (as it is in Jeffrey Hatcher's Stage Beauty, which is about the introduction of women on the stage during the Restoration). Grimm could manage it better if he kept himself from taking a sermonizing tone when the young men quarrel in the wake of their discovery that they're gay and when Flaminia and La Piccola point out the hypocrisy of Giancarlo's tirade against his beloved's sexual experience. Grimm's self-righteousness flattens out the play, which is often genuinely witty. And he's self-conscious in his use of bawdy humor. The characters crack filthy jokes, which are hilarious at best. But Grimm labors under the misperception that obscenity is automatically funny, and after the first few times you've heard each of the characters curse, the comic shock wears off.

Sox trump comedy "Being bitter is poison and bitter will kill you. Bitter is a root that will grow a poopy tree of death."

Autumn garden It's freshman and sophomore year on the Boston rialto, with American Repertory Theater artistic director Diane Paulus introducing her first season and Huntington Theatre Company honcho Peter DuBois endeavoring to survive his second.

Zero at the bone A bleak expressionist fable centered on a murderous bookkeeper symbolically named Zero. Even when you throw in sexual repression, religious zealotry, a trip to Heaven, and enough dissonance to sate Stephen Sondheim, that doesn’t sound like the stuff of song and dance.

Get me remix The Brothers Grimm generally managed to live up to their name.

Review: Viktor Ullmann's The Emperor of Atlantis The Boston Lyric Opera, with Boston Classical Orchestra music director Steven Lipsitt and a company of singers and designers largely new to Boston, has given us a memorable production of the opera that composer Viktor Ullmann and poet Petr Kien created in 1943 at the Terezín concentration camp, The Emperor of Atlantis, or Death Quits .

Company One takes on Jason Grote's whirling 1001 Grote uses the same framing device as the original One Thousand and One Nights , which begins with Shahriyar (Nael Nacer) discovering his wife's infidelity and deciding that the only way to prevent his future wives from cheating is to marry virgins, deflower them, and execute them the next morning.

Cambridge moves to Boston in Before I Leave You Fear of mortality is a domino in Before I Leave You, the play with which 72-year-old dramatist Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro, who has been flexing her inky fingers in Cambridge for 40 years, enters the big time.

BAFFLED IN BOISE | October 09, 2012 Samuel D. Hunter's A Bright New Boise, receiving its Boston premiere in a production by the Zeitgeist Stage Company, has no dramatic structure.

SAD BOY | October 02, 2012 The Irish playwright Brendan Behan, known for his plays The Hostage and The Quare Fellow and for his memoir Borstal Boy, was a raucous, charismatic, hard-drinking Irish Republican who began to write after he got out of prison for shooting at English detectives during a public event.

GOOD PEOPLE COULD BE BETTER | September 24, 2012 Good People , which opens the SEASON at the Huntington Theatre Company, is a schizoid experience.